Horror Writers Share the Most Frightening Tales They've Actually Read
Andrew Michael Hurley
The Summer People by a master of suspense
I read this story years ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The titular seasonal visitors happen to be a family urban dwellers, who occupy a particular off-grid rural cabin each year. On this occasion, in place of heading back home, they opt to extend their stay for a month longer – an action that appears to disturb each resident in the nearby town. All pass on a similar vague warning that no one has ever stayed at the lake beyond the holiday. Even so, the couple insist to remain, and that is the moment situations commence to grow more bizarre. The individual who supplies oil won’t sell to them. Nobody agrees to bring food to the cottage, and when the Allisons endeavor to travel to the community, the automobile fails to start. Bad weather approaches, the batteries of their radio die, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together inside their cabin and waited”. What could be the Allisons anticipating? What do the locals understand? Whenever I read Jackson’s chilling and influential story, I’m reminded that the best horror stems from what’s left undisclosed.
An Acclaimed Writer
An Eerie Story by Robert Aickman
In this short story a pair go to a common seaside town where church bells toll constantly, a constant chiming that is bothersome and inexplicable. The first extremely terrifying moment happens after dark, when they opt to take a walk and they are unable to locate the sea. The beach is there, the scent exists of putrid marine life and seawater, waves crash, but the sea appears spectral, or something else and worse. It is simply profoundly ominous and each occasion I visit to the coast after dark I remember this narrative which spoiled the ocean after dark to my mind – in a good way.
The recent spouses – she’s very young, the husband is older – go back to the inn and find out why the bells ring, in a long sequence of claustrophobia, macabre revelry and death-and-the-maiden meets danse macabre chaos. It is a disturbing reflection regarding craving and decay, a pair of individuals growing old jointly as spouses, the attachment and violence and affection in matrimony.
Not only the scariest, but perhaps among the finest concise narratives in existence, and a personal favourite. I experienced it in Spanish, in the first edition of Aickman stories to be published locally a decade ago.
A Prominent Novelist
Zombie by an esteemed writer
I delved into this narrative beside the swimming area in France recently. Even with the bright weather I experienced cold creep through me. I also felt the excitement of fascination. I was composing my third novel, and I had hit an obstacle. I wasn’t sure if there was an effective approach to craft certain terrifying elements the narrative involves. Reading Zombie, I saw that it was possible.
Published in 1995, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a young serial killer, the main character, modeled after an infamous individual, the criminal who murdered and mutilated 17 young men and boys in Milwaukee during a specific period. Infamously, the killer was consumed with making a zombie sex slave who would stay him and attempted numerous horrific efforts to accomplish it.
The deeds the story tells are terrible, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. The character’s terrible, fragmented world is directly described using minimal words, details omitted. You is sunk deep trapped in his consciousness, obliged to see ideas and deeds that appal. The alien nature of his mind is like a physical shock – or finding oneself isolated on a barren alien world. Starting this story is not just reading and more like a physical journey. You are swallowed whole.
An Accomplished Author
A Haunting Novel from a gifted writer
When I was a child, I walked in my sleep and eventually began experiencing nightmares. Once, the fear included a dream where I was stuck in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped the slat out of the window frame, attempting to escape. That building was decaying; when storms came the entranceway became inundated, fly larvae dropped from above into the bedroom, and once a sizeable vermin scaled the curtains in my sister’s room.
After an acquaintance handed me this author’s book, I was no longer living in my childhood residence, but the tale about the home high on the Dover cliffs seemed recognizable to me, longing at that time. It’s a book concerning a ghostly noisy, emotional house and a young woman who consumes calcium from the shoreline. I loved the book immensely and returned again and again to it, consistently uncovering {something
